


lost something in the hills

by somethingdifferent



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/M, Wilderness, is it really a fairytale au if it's ouat?, the world may never know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-18 14:08:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3572480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingdifferent/pseuds/somethingdifferent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here, there is nothing to dream of, nothing to break the monotony of the landscape, even the harbor and the people concealed by the mist.</p>
<p>Nothing, save the colors of her, that bright cloak, those gleaming eyes, the dark hair, and the wolves as they stride, black silhouettes making circles that move closer and closer around him.</p>
<p>[frankenwolf; fairy tale fusion]</p>
            </blockquote>





	lost something in the hills

_ I yearn for the roots of the woods, the origin of all my strong and strange moods. _  
(Sibylle Baier)

_Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it._  
(Donna Tartt)

_ I am alone and miserable. Only someone as ugly as I am could love me. _  
(Mary Shelley)

 

 

 

 

The first thing is a flash of red against the snow, just a second of it - he can see the way it moves between the trees, so bright it hurts his eyes. For a moment, he forgets what he's doing, pulls too fast on the plant, and the thorns cut his hands. When he bleeds, it's the same color.

(He won't remember everything, but he will remember this.)

 

-

 

_I could tell you stories. You wouldn't be so certain then._

At dinner, the man presses his wrist against his temple, hard, sure, and unforgiving. In the harbor the water is frozen, his crew trapped, and Hook (as they call him) is speaking of legends. Women casting spells. Grinding bones. Turning into beasts.  _They say the girls here change. Say they'll eat you alive, Doctor. Say they'll tear you to pieces._

_Guess it's a good thing I don't believe in ghosts,_ he says, and Hook smiles.

_Who said anything about ghosts?_

 

-

 

He doesn't dream when it snows. Outside, everything is white, smothered in it, suffocated, and when he leaves the cabin, even if just for a moment, he can feel his fingers start to freeze.

Of all the places, he would wonder at the start, of all the places his father could have sent him he chose this - a wasteland, a place of white and white and nothing more, save for the flowers, the weeds, the dying and the dead and the living, the few living, holed up in their houses like fearful creatures, afraid of the night, of the snow, of the animals, of the nothing.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees that same burst of color, and wonders if he'll go crazy after all.

 

-

 

Over a woman's sickbed, he glimpses her. He looks up, and there she is. The girl isn't wearing red, but when she meets his eyes he can see the way hers glint gold.

He shivers without knowing why.

 

-

 

(He will remember the stories later. But this is only later.)

 

-

 

_Doctor,_ she says, taking his hand without a hint of any propriety, turning it over and over between her fingers, her nails brushing cold against his skin,  _will she be better?_ When she glances back up, she licks her lips.

Victor can't help but think she did so on purpose.

_It's hard to tell,_ he replies, and, with too much reluctance, pulls his hand away.

 

-

 

_Was it you who I saw in the woods?_ he asks in a dream, knows he's dreaming.

She turns, murmurs,  _you were pulling flowers._

Bares her throat to the moon.

 

-

 

He should be thinking of someone else, dreaming of someone else. There had been his home, there had been his mother, his brother. There had been Elizabeth, wearing white in the spring, picking wildflowers in the field behind the house, holding his hand when she sat at the piano to play.

Here, there is nothing to dream of, nothing to break the monotony of the landscape, even the harbor and the people concealed by the mist.

Nothing, save the colors of her, that bright cloak, those gleaming eyes, the dark hair, and the wolves as they stride, black silhouettes making circles that move closer and closer around him.

He learns her name from the sailors staying at the inn, and in the dark of his room he whispers it as if it were a prayer, repeated, solemn, sacred: _Ruby Lucas, Ruby Lucas, Ruby Lucas._ All of her stained red against the snow.

 

-

 

The woman who dies is her grandmother. When he offers his condolences, he calls her by name, by the name she never gave him.

_Ruby,_ he says, holding her hand gently in his, then hurried, horrified, corrects himself,  _Miss Lucas._

She smiles, and he can see that her incisors are as sharp as a dog's.  _Doctor,_ she grins, _how frightened you seem._

This time, he must wrench his hand away.

 

-

 

In his sleep, he cannot feel the cold, and neither can she.

Outside, standing silent and terrible in the snow, she takes off her cloak, long fingers moving nimbly to pull at the strings. When he pulls her to him his hands shake against her ribs.

He wakes up in a sweat, aching.

 

-

 

He sees her against his window, a red figure that presses its claws against the glass - fur, teeth, and the same eyes. He ventures outside, into the snow, pushing toward her until it reaches past his knees, his legs frozen, his mind weary and addled with sleep.

_I killed my brother,_ he tells this new shape of her, as she rears back on hind legs, _I killed him and then left him to live as something terrible._

The creature cannot speak, but her eyes as they gaze give enough of a reply: _I have killed, too._

 

-

 

In the morning, he finds her on his doorstep, naked and asleep. Around her are pieces of rabbits, the antlers of a deer, blood and fur and teeth.

He wraps her in a blanket and carries her inside, then buries everything else in the snow.

 

-

 

_Did you see me there? Victor, did you see me in the woods? In my skin?_

He looks at her, does not say,  _I want to_ undo _you._

 

_-_

 

His problem is always the same. Victor asks for too much, too often, more than anyone could possibly get, more than anyone could possibly deserve. When his brother died, he couldn't accept the funeral; when his brother wasn't what he should have been, he couldn't pull the trigger, and Elizabeth died for it.

_My love,_ Ruby tells him, _he is always with me._  She runs her fingers from her neck to her stomach, pushing aside the blanket, exposing the skin over her sternum. He looks away, instead tries to remember the bones of the body, remembering the dissections from school: sternum, clavicle, cranium, mandible, femur, ribs. _I tore the flesh from him and drank his blood._

Her eyes seem to burn through his.

 

-

 

Back home - back in Geneva, in Ingolstadt, in the wilderness beyond this wilderness, here - his name lives on in infamy. If his father were alive, if Elizabeth were, he knows they would die of shame.

If Gerhardt weren't dead, he would never have had to know this.

Frankenstein, he thinks, when they speak both of the man and the creature: still the name of a monster.

 

-

 

The full moon lasts for three days. Each morning she leaves, vanishes into the woods toward town, where she sells flowers in the market for pennies; each evening she returns to the woods, and when he finds her after midnight she is asleep on his porch, wearing nothing until he dresses her in a blanket and takes her inside.

_My cloak tore,_ she tells him, _after grandmother died. It kept me safe. I cannot repair it._

_Do you know what you kill?_

She smiles like it pains her to do so. _I can never remember._

 

-

 

_You didn't hurt me. That night, when I first saw you._

_Maybe I already knew you were part of the pack,_ she murmurs, the blanket shrugging off of her shoulder. In Geneva, the women were so chaste, their lips and hair pale and bloodless - he doesn't know what to do with himself when Ruby looks as she does.

_Maybe you can control it,_ he suggests, lifting his eyes from her neck and staring deliberately at hers. _Maybe we could be monsters together._

 

-

 

He reminds himself of his restraint, but he is still the one who reaches first.

He reminds himself of his discipline, but he still shakes as he opens her mouth with his.

 

-

 

He thought, when he first saw that burst of red across the field as he picked flowers for medicine, flowers to starve illness, that she was a harbinger for death. He believed with a certainty he couldn't explain, not to anyone, least of all himself, that she was an omen for him, that she would be the unraveling of the veins that bind him together like thread.

She runs her hands down his chest and leans back, tilts her head so he can see the white curve of her neck even in the moonlight, the scent of her all around him, surrounding him until he can't feel or see or think of anything else, and he thinks he could've been half right.

 

-

 

Across the field, he sees her walking in the morning, the watery sun beginning to break through the trees, alighting the grass and wildflowers growing along the path, defiant of the snow.

When he closes his eyes, he still sees the shape of her, violent and brilliant and red.

When he opens them, he can see that she is grinning at him - the smile of a wolf.

 

 


End file.
